Emily Susan Apter (born 1954) is an American academic, translator, editor and professor.
This book has been described as a work of political philology, where she makes vast use of neologisms and alters the meaning of other terms by setting them in a whole different context.
Apter finds it essential to pay the necessary attention to untranslatability and she argues that translation is no substitute for the original.
The problems and failures in translation are unavoidable and part of the process and result in what she calls the "Untranslatables".
[10] Continental Drift focuses on the French colonial and postcolonial experience, together with the fate of national literatures in an increasingly globalised world.
In an interdisciplinary approach, Apter explores the topic of fetishism and perversion through a narratological, New Historical, hermeneutical, feminist, and psychoanalytical lens.